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Comment by lukevdp | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the same things that help humans help agents. Simplicity helps humans, for agents parsing complexity is a breeze.

Not saying code quality isn't important - it is. But I think what is described as quality code will change.

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Agents still pay a penalty for complexity even if it is a smaller one.

Parsing single file is easier than navigating a file system for an LLM. Until the models have context windows large enough to hold the entire codebase in one shot, single files will beat multiple files every time.

This. I suspect the codebases in the future will be made of a small number of gigantic source files. These will be able to be transpiled into a more human friendly that produces multiple smaller files per big file in human-debug mode.

As a human who typically uses large files, 10k to 30K lines of code files are pretty common, I find the agents don’t read the whole file after the first time, they almost always do a range select for the bit they are interested in.

But you wouldn’t argue that a 30k line file is good code would you?

Humans write bad code to. For me the litmus test is: will someone read this in the future. If yes, then write good code.

I don’t think we are in the era when a human will never read the code again in human history. So we should still strive for human intelligibility.

The code I write is good. I don’t write for the lowest common denominator, readers need to be hard core functional programmers as a pre-req.

The great thing about AI is that it’s raising the bar on lowest common denominator.

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